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Valium, the anti-anxiety drug that was once the most popular prescription medication in America, might have a naturally occurring relative in the mammalian brain, according to a new paper in Neuron. Stanford University researchers have discovered that a protein called diazepam binding inhibitor (DBI) can have some of the same effects as Valium. Diazepam (Valium), belongs to a class of psychoactive drugs known as benzodiazepines, and can be used to stop epileptic seizures, especially during clusters of repeated seizures.

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The 66-year-old Vietnam-born Chinese man is an orphan. He has a beard, small penis and no testes. Just 1.37 metres tall, he has decided to continue perceiving himself as a male and may receive male hormone treatment, the report said.

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Diarrhea and vomiting are common. Some participants report seeing “unnatural matter” flood from all the orifices of their bodies. They are told that it is toxins being flushed from their system. “It was the most beautiful diarrhea I’ve ever had in my life,” says Dieter. “I shit for what felt like hours. It was very cleansing.”

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Now the 38-year-old is charged with fraud, false pretenses and using a computer to commit a crime after state police found no doctor who diagnosed cancer. The charges come as those who regularly helped Ylen reel from the news that the man who spent nearly 10 years in prison for her rape was released last year, after newly discovered evidence cast doubt on whether she’d ever been attacked. “The fact that she’s lived this long is a miracle. But maybe it wasn’t a miracle after all. … I’m just baffled. Is she the biggest con artist in the state of Michigan or the victim?” Connell said. The fraud case isn’t Ylen’s only concern. In a neighboring county, she is charged with making a false report of rape just last year, even using makeup to create bruises.

Mother, who’s daughter was a victim of a gun crime at a graduation party, tells dogs to attack news anchor who comes to tell her the suspect has turned his self into prison!

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In the second verse of the song (yes, the one that starts with the line, “To my home girls here with the big butts”), Cyrus implies cocaine usage: “Everyone in line in the bathroom, Trying to get a line in the bathroom, We all so turnt up here, Gettin’ turnt up yeah yeah.” Even “turnt up” isn’t just a banal term for having fun. According to the top result here, “turnt up” means “thee act of getting drunk and high to thee highest degree.” The second highest-rated definition reads, “A state of altered consciousness induced by alcohol or narcotics, also being happy and excited and energetic.” But cocaine isn’t just a solo star here; in the pre-chorus, Cyrus brings in Ecstasy (or for you science majors out there, Methylenedioxymethamphetamine.) “La-da-di-da-di, We like to party, Dancin’ with molly, Doin’ whatever we want.” “Molly” is a commonly used slang term for ecstasy

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Say you’re a cyberspy for the NSA and you want sensitive inside information on companies in South Africa. What do you do? Search for confidential Excel spreadsheets the company inadvertently posted online by typing “filetype:xls site:za confidential” into Google, the book notes. Want to find spreadsheets full of passwords in Russia? Type “filetype:xls site:ru login.” Even on websites written in non-English languages the terms “login,” “userid,” and “password” are generally written in English, the authors helpfully point out. Misconfigured web servers “that list the contents of directories not intended to be on the web often offer a rich load of information to Google hackers,” the authors write, then offer a command to exploit these vulnerabilities — intitle: “index of” site:kr password.

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This rich quality of the opium experience helped explain its popularity. A huge number of Chinese men smoked, some occasionally, some daily and some so frequently they were known as yan gui, opium ghosts. Opium was called fu shou gao, happiness and longevity paste, and created vivid waking dreams. It was said to be an aphrodisiac, making it fashionable among the rich, who smoked expensive opium through ornate pipes in luxurious brothels. It also dulled pain, quelled appetites, blurred time and relaxed muscles, making it equally desirable for coolies, manual labourers who spent long, desperate hours engaged in back-breaking work with minimal food. Coolies smoked cheap native opium or dross – used opium scraped from bowls – through simple pipes. People smoked together in special buildings, where opium could be bought, prepared and consumed. Women smoked too, although in nowhere near the numbers as men.

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This is a real mystery. You think when you lock your car and set the alarm, your car is pretty safe. But criminals have designed a new high-tech gadget giving them full access to your car. It’s so easy, it’s like the criminals have your actual door remote. Police are so baffled they want to see if you can help crack the case. A Long Beach, Calif., surveillance video shows a thief approaching a locked SUV in a driveway. Police say he’s carrying a small device in the palm of his hand. You can barely see it, but he aims it at the car and pops the locks electronically. He’s in, with access to everything. No commotion at all. Then his accomplice shows up and hits another car, using that same handheld device.

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People all over Israel are celebrating Purim this weekend, and much like Halloween, the dress-up holiday is a perfect opportunity for parents to show off their creativity and then display it on their poor kids. The winners of the contest for Costume of Poorest Taste are definitely 7-year-old twins Ilay and Nehoray, who dressed up as the burning World Trade Center towers with the planes still in them on 9/11. At least they spared us the jumpers. Publication of the picture on the Israeli news website Ynet prompted widespread condemnation. How would Israelis feel if Americans dressed up as a burning Tel Aviv bus, or Europeans wore a “train to Auschwitz” costume? some asked.

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The veteran porn actor known as Mr. Marcus was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days in jail after pleading no contest to knowingly exposing his co-stars to syphilis. The 42-year-old actor, whose real name is Jesse Spencer, was also ordered to perform 15 days of community service and serve three years on probation. His infection was discovered in July 2012 during a routine industry screening before he was to begin making a film. He immediately received a penicillin shot, but when he was rescreened 11 days later he still showed signs of syphilis. Authorities say he altered the results of that second test and returned to work the following day. Spencer is jailed on $200,000 bail in an unrelated drunken driving case. An email was sent to his management company seeking comment. Spencer has said previously he thought he was no longer infectious when he returned to work. Prosecutors said he took part in two adult movie shoots within a week of failing the second test.

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Please excuse us as we go toss our iced coffee; a new investigation from The Daily Mail has found that ice from McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Starbucks, and more fast-food chains, tested in the U.K., was all more bacteria-ridden than toilet water.

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A boozy Brooklyn lawyer tried to skip out on a $6 taxi fare — then was busted after stripping off her panties and tossing them at cops while screaming profanities, police said. Cops they found a very drunk Stephanie Hendricks, 39 — who has clerked for an Oregon Supreme Court justice and served as a Blackmun Fellow — in front of a Williamsburg deli after she bolted from a yellow cab at around 2:30 a.m. Saturday. The bawdy barrister, who lives with her churchgoing mom in Flatlands, pulled off her panties, showed cops her lady parts, then lunged at them and yelled, “Suck my p—y,’’ and, “Eat my ass, you f–king pigs!” police said. Thanks Jasmine

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A PALMERSTON woman has lashed out at the strangers who keep shaving her pussy. Cat owner Yvonne Birch has had her feline friend Cleo return home shaved for the second time in months – and she is not happy about it. “I wish whoever did it would own up and tell me the problem they have,” Ms Birch said. “Or just stop shaving my f***ing cat.”

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Perez was arrested after he and a group took a tour of the Chicago Animal Care and Control Facility at 2741 S. Western Ave. on May 29, prosecutors said. After the man broke off from the tour group, an employee of the facility spotted him going into a restricted area, prosecutors said. After the employee told the man to leave the restricted area, the man left but returned a short time later. When the employee returned, he found the man inside the restricted area again and inside a cage with a white and grey pit bull, prosecutors said. The employee found the man on his hands and knees on the side of the dog, and it appeared the man had just had sexual contact with the animal, prosecutors said. The man made “inculpatory statements regarding sexual conduct with the dog” to several employees of the facility, police said.

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Not only can the singer see dead people, she claims to have sexual relations with them. “Well, I’d like to have sex with a dinosaur, Liberace, and Patrick Swayze.” Ke$ha told the Huffington Post. Specifically, she said that she would sleep with a ghost of a T-Rex. In an interview with Ryan Seacrest, Ke$ha revealed last September that she had multiple sexual experiences with a ghost and that her song Supernatural was inspired by the affair.

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Here’s a novel way to reduce racism: Convince people their skin is darker than it really is. No need to break out the tanning booth. A new study finds that an illusion that makes people feel that a rubber hand is their own can make white people less unconsciously biased against people with dark skin. “It comes down to a perceived similarity between white and dark skin,” study researcher Lara Maister, a psychologist at Royal Holloway University of London, said in a statement. “The illusion creates an overlap, which in turn helps to reduce negative attitudes because participants see less difference between themselves and those with dark skin.”

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I remember when video games were about getting Mario to save the princess and, when you were done, the console would leave you the hell alone. The new Xbox one apparently wants to put an end to those days by turning the beloved game console into a 24/7 surveillance device. The Xbox One will bundle the Kinect – a device that captures motion and sound – with every console and its camera and mic will be always on by default. In fact, Xbox One will actually refuse to work if the Kinect is not connected to it. So the camera and mic will work even when the console is turned off. And the camera will even work in the dark. Yup. It will also be able to read your facial expressions and count the people in the room with you (there are also talks of charging Pay-Per-View movies PER PERSON in the room).

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Drugs such as cocaine and heroin aren’t just glamorous because they’re illegal. Even when you could buy them at any pharmacy or grocery store, they still had a certain cool factor. Just look at these fantastic vintage advertisements for opium, coca-laced wine and “medicinal tonics.”

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I’ve come across people who believe that Max Headroom, the Channel 4 character from the Eighties, was a genuine piece of computer animation. But although he was conceived by the animators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (of Cucumber Films fame) Max himself was portrayed by actor Matt Frewer, placed into latex makeup and a shiny costume and set amidst a range of technological tricks. Half of the frames from the footage used in Max Headroom were removed in production, resulting in a juddery look to suggest animation shot on twos, and Frewer was bluescreened in front of a basic digital backdrop. The crew even added deliberate faults to the “animation” – such as the stammer which became Max’s trademark – to complete the effect.

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Homeowner George Burton wasn’t expecting any packages this week, especially not one this big, but Thursday evening his dog sitter brought in a large FedEx Kinkos Box that was sitting on his front porch. “It was addressed to me or a return address to me: my name, my address were hand-written on this package,” Burton said. The package had several different addresses on it, including one from Illinois. When no one claimed it at the Kinkos on J Street, the box was sent to the return address listed as Burton’s home of eight years. “We start opening it up and it’s filled with that packing Styrofoam, the spray-in stuff that’s hard to get through,” said Burton. “We break into it, I look, and say, ‘This isn’t what I think it is?'” The package contained 11 pounds of tightly packaged marijuana. Burton immediately called police, who were just as surprised.

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Everything we’ve been told about drugs is wrong, Hart says. The vast majority of drug users never become addicted. Cops, politicians and the media have consistently told us scare stories overstating the effects of drugs, misinterpreting the science around them in the process. Hart’s own research is notable for focusing on drugs administered to humans, not rats, in a lab. It has cut against the prevailing conventional wisdom that, for example, crack-cocaine users don’t respond to economic alternatives. He serves on the highest body in his field, the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse, which is affiliated with the National Institutes of Health.

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A new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has weighed in with an educated guess about the Israeli military’s secretive nuclear weapons program, estimating the nation has around 80 “strategic” level nuclear weapons. The estimate suggests 50 of the warheads are for Jericho II medium range missiles, with another 30 gravity bombs to be dropped from warplanes. The report says it is possible that smaller tactical nukes could also be in the nation’s arsenal. If true, this would make Israel’s arsenal the smallest of the eight nuclear powers, though roughly in line with India and Pakistan who both, like Israel, are not signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). SIPRI put their arsenals in the range of 90-120 warheads.

The study suggests a higher risk of death for patients who have elective surgical procedures carried out later in the working week and at the weekend.

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“I’ve never abused my children,” Heath Campbell told the station regarding the charges. “I only name my children and I don’t think it’s right anymore.” The other children — 7-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, 6-year-old JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and 5-year-old Honzlynn Jeannie Campbell — were taken from the couple’s custody in January 2009, a month after the couple got into a disagreement with a local bakery when it refused to write Adolf Hiler Campbell’s name on a birthday cake.

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The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared that an astounding 55 percent of rivers and streams in the country are in “poor condition for aquatic life.” The results of their first comprehensive survey of waterway health reveal shrinking vegetation cover, high levels of phosphorous and nitrogen, and pollution from mercury and bacteria—none of which are all that great for human health either. These issues pose a threat not only to 1.2 million miles of waterways, but also the coastal areas, lakes and bays that are served by those rivers and streams. Additionally, as the EPA emphasizes, the polluted, unhealthy waterways include vital sources of drinking water.

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A case of anthrax infection has been reported in a user of injectable heroin in France in the Rhone-Alpes, while four other cases, including two deaths, were reported in two other countries in the European Union, it was learned Friday from medical sources. An outbreak of anthrax related to injections of contaminated heroin occurred in 2009/2010, causing the infection of 119 people in Scotland, 5 in England and two in Germany. The infection by the bacterium, _Bacillus anthracis_, was diagnosed in France on July 9 in an intravenous heroin user, aged of 27, who, after a stay in intensive care, is currently convalescing. “He is recovering,” the Director of Public Health ARS-Sydney, Anne-Marie Durand told AFP. “There is [presently – Mod.MHJ] no known link between the four European cases (three in Germany with 1 death and one death in Denmark) and the French case,” she said.

Misspelled tattoos are the gift that keeps on giving. Here are more of the worst crimes ever made against the skin.

Henry Rollins: I looked at the ice cream scoop in my hand…my chocolate-bespattered apron…and my future in the world of minimum wage work…or I could go up to New York and audition for this crazy band who was my favorite. What’s the worst that’s gonna happen to me? I miss a day of work…ooh, there goes 21 bucks. In the audition, he sang every song the band had ever written, improvising most of the lyrics. Then came the scary part: he got the job. Henry Rollins: They said ‘Ok, you’re in.” I said “What do you mean?” They said “you’re the singer in Black Flag.” I said “So what do I do?” They said: “*snort* you quit your job, you pack your gear, you meet us on the road. Here’s the tour itinerary. Here’s the lyrics.”

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.

A technique to remove pieces of ovary, store it for decades and then replace it with delicate surgery could effectively put a woman’s menopause ‘on ice’, doctors said. The only thing preventing them from having babies into their old age would be their physical ability to carry a pregnancy, they said. The controversial notion would allow career women peace of mind with a fertility insurance policy so they can find a partner, settle down and become financially secure before starting a family.

✪ One Mighty and Strong: Mormon Prophecy and Mitt Romney

Prior to his death, Smith had written a prophecy declaring that there would one day come a man “mighty and strong” (see scriptural reference at the top of this post) who would bring order to the “house of God”. Many (probably Joseph included) thought this mighty and strong man would be Smith himself. With the loss of their Prophet, Mormons struggled to understand who would fill those mighty shoes. After Smith’s death, a Mormon tradition arose about a Mormon on a “white horse” who would come at a time when the Constitution was “hanging by a thread” and would restore the promised land to the Mormon people.

I just got a new dog from the human society, and I was wondering if it was possible to get him circumcised?

”My advice would be to make sure you leave plenty of room around the groin area and that your pants and trousers feel comfortable so you’re not being restricted in any way. ”Men who wear tight or ill-fitting trousers, or underwear which is restrictive around the groin area could be damaging their health. ”Wearing tight-fitting clothing over a prolonged period of time can lead to urinary tract infections leading to over-activity of the bladder – a type of bladder weakness as well as a low sperm count and fungal infections. ”Please don’t put style before health.” Twisted testicles occur when tight trousers prevent the spermatic cord from moving freely, meaning it twists and leads to testicular torsion which cuts off the blood supply requiring immediate surgery to prevent a gangrenous testicle.

THE device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. Let’s stop calling them phones. They are trackers.

Jewish institutions throughout the United States will receive $9.7 million in federal anti-terrorism grants this year out of a total of $10 million allocated to not-for-profit institutions by the Department of Homeland Security. That’s $6 million less than last year. But thanks to sharp cuts this year in the overall pool of money available through this program, the percentage of funds going to Jewish groups has nevertheless jumped substantially. A full 97% of the available funds in the Non-Profit Security Grant Program for 2012 have been allocated to Jewish organizations, compared with 73% that went to Jewish groups from 2007 through 2010. In 2011, Jewish groups received about 80% of NSGP funds.

The boy told investigators it began when Brashear asked him to spot her on the weights, then talked him into going into the tanning booth with her. Once inside, Brashear stripped off her clothes from the waist down and began kissing him, he said. Brashear stated to police she knew the boy was only 15, “there was nothing wrong or illegal about giving someone a kiss” and denied taking off her clothes, the affidavit says.

From February 2000 to April 2011, Griffis operated a tanning bed in a barn on his property at 2261 SE 128th St. in Starke. Customers would pay to use the bed by putting money in a slot. The bed had a two-way mirror, according to the government, and Griffis made a hole in an vent near the foot of the bed. Through the mirror and hole, he recorded customers as they undressed and got in and out of the tanning bed. His victims were “dozens of female customers, including more than 20 minor children,” the news release states. “Griffis produced, collected, and maintained the sexually explicit video recordings … for his own sexual gratification, and kept detailed notes on the types of physical and sexual characteristics of his customers.”

✪ Dog X-ray used in arrest of doctor in prescription probe

The undercover sheriff’s deputy pretending to be a patient in pain presented a Glendora physician with an X-ray to accompany her tale of an injured back and neck. The only problem was the X-ray revealed a “tail” of a different kind — one belonging to a dog. Though the X-ray for a German shepherd had the dog’s name, Recon, and the name of an animal hospital printed on it, the doctor wrote the deputy a prescription for a powerful narcotic painkiller and a muscle relaxant, law enforcement officials said.

An inmate who identified himself only as “Josh” told The Daily that the last time Sandusky was in jail, he and other prisoners serenaded the former assistant coach with a famous line from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” “At night, we were singing ‘Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone,’ ” Josh said.

But one item made him stop. Frozen in time beneath a wooden doll house and a century’s worth of dust, Mr. Kissner found a cardboard green box filled with baseball cards. The names sounded familiar — Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Connie Mack — and he soon contacted an auction house in Dallas. It was his family’s winning lottery ticket. Experts say the trove of about 700 nearly mint cards just might represent the greatest and rarest discovery in the sports card industry’s history. The best of the collection is expected to fetch more than $500,000 at the National Sports Collectors Convention next month in Baltimore while the entire stock could bring in $3 million.

He and his thug pal had stalked the family back to their home from the laundry, where Guerrero had just finished her weekly wash. “They were eye-balling them — and the chain,” said one police source. The duo attacked as the family got inside the lobby of their building, kicking in the door after the desperate mother had locked it. After neighbors started coming out of their apartments at the sound of the mother’s screams, the crooks fled with the necklace.

The tow truck driver told investigators he saw a naked man masturbating while driving the Cherokee. “The male’s hands were in his groin area moving around,” the police report said. When Casey was eventually pulled over along the side of Interstate 95, it took him a moment to come to a stop because, according to the arresting officer’s notes in the report, he was still trying to get dressed. When the officer asked him why he was driving naked, “Casey stated that he has problems with this and he is getting therapy,” the report said, adding that the man couldn’t explain why he was naked. The officer then patted Casey down and found a toy pistol tied to his leg, part of which was hidden in Casey’s behind. Another portion of the contraption was tied around his genitals, the report said.

Nothing is True, Everything is Permissible. – Hasan bin Sabbah The story of Hasan bin Sabbah is a tale of sex, drugs, myth, and murder. A secluded mountain fortress, a paradisial garden, poison dipped daggers, and covert political maneuverings are the ingredients of this alchemical mixture, which is undoubtedly one of the most intriguing true stories ever told.

“We spend billions and billions trying to interdict the importation [of drugs] into the country, trying to interdict the wholesale and retail of drugs, but when’s the last time someone saw a major public service announcement saying, ‘If you have opiate dependence, there’s treatment available, call this number’?” he asked.

According to the report, the victim heard Olmos say “room service” outside of their roomand the victim told her to “come in.” Olmos asked if they had any dirty towels and if the victim was alone, which he was, according to the police report. Olmos then asked “Can I touch?” The victim responded, “touch what?” Police said Olmos then grabbed the victim’s genitals on the outside of his shorts and said “you hot.” The victim then responded “you’re weird” and walked to the bathroom, waiting for Olmos to leave, according to the report.

The teeth of two of the world’s most famous composers have been stolen from their graves by a man who says he wants to start a museum. The alleged Czech thief who has boasted about his crime on the internet says he wants to now display the famous teeth and dentures he has robbed not just from Austrian waltz king Johann Strauss Jr. and German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms, but from hundreds of other graves as well. Austrian police were alerted to the crime after the grave robber released a video where he can be seen apparently pushing the cover to one of the composer’s tomb open – and pulling out a skull.

New details were revealed to WTVM about an adopted teenager who was allegedly kept in a chicken coop in Taylor County, GA. According to agents at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the 15-year-old girl told authorities a shock collar for dogs was placed around her neck and used on her several times. Investigators say a remote key fob was used to shock the girl at will by anyone in control of the collar.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.” “They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.

“Abuse-deterrent formulations may not be the ‘magic bullets’ that many hoped they would be in solving the growing problem of opioid abuse,” the researchers wrote in the July 12 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

✪ Angry dad beats up facebook pervert

It began recently when the Cookeville man noticed that his 12-year-old daughter was receiving Facebook messages from an adult man he does not know. He asked his daughter about the messages and she did not know the man either. The father looked up the messenger’s Facebook page and there found his date of birth and phone number. He then decided to send messages to the Monterey man while posing as his own daughter. He sent text messages by phone to the man, and the man messaged back, thinking he was communicating with the little girl. Allegedly, he asked to see a photo of her in a swim suit. He also agreed to meet her at Cane Creek Park. But once he arrived there, it was her dad who met him, and he was very angry, according to police reports on the case. Before police arrived on the scene, the two men had a fight, and the Monterey man, who was bleeding, immediately told arriving officers that he deserved it.

While law enforcement and the government would like citizens to believe measures such as these are their way of catching up with the rapid pace of evolving technology in regards to criminal behavior, something more sinister could be at work. Given the interest the Department of Homeland Security has had in Occupy movements around the country as well as some of the more draconian police tactics that have been used on demonstrators, the increased surveillance of internet users and the content they choose to share via social networking, mobile devices or the web, it’s not difficult to call these information requests police state type tactics.

Fresh from performing at Science Gallery in Dublin last night during the opening of Hack the City, an English group of urbanists, technologists and architects who created GPS-enabled quadcopter drones, were held at London Southend Airport on suspicion of terrorism and recorded under the UK’s Terrorism Act. The group, known as Tomorrows Thoughts Today, had been performing their Electronic Countermeasures robotic ballet in the sky show at Science Gallery for the opening of the three-month Hack the City exhibition in Dublin City. The trio, headed up by Liam Young, had created the robotic drones from components that were originally intended for police surveillance. The drones had been swarming around Science Gallery last night to show how they can broadcast their own Wi-Fi network as a flying pirate file-sharing formation.

Just went to the hospital to visit Du Chuanwang. This 13-year-old mother-less child had gone to work in an auto repair shop to help take care of his family ended up having a high pressure pneumatic air pump gun stuck into his anus by two workers who then pumped air into him! The child’s intestines have essentially exploded, his scrotum now as large as a watermelon! His internal organs have all been squeezed together by the air pumped into his body, so horrific!

More than a year after the MPAA and RIAA announced their groundbreaking anti-piracy deal with U.S. Internet providers, the first warning letters are yet to be sent out. Previously, July 2012 was coined as the start date but the responsible parties are still not ready to launch. While TorrentFreak has learned that various ISPs will start the implementation at different times, it remains a mystery which company will be spying on filesharers. casSomewhere in the near future the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) will start to track down online ‘pirates’ as part of an agreement all major US Internet providers struck with the MPAA and RIAA. The parties agreed on a system through which copyright infringers are warned that their behavior is unacceptable. After five or six warnings ISPs may then take a variety of repressive measures, including temporary disconnections.

They are the pride of America – Team U.S.A. – and for the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in London, they’ll be proudly wearing red, white and blue, from beret to blazer. The classic American style – shown in an image above – was crafted by designer Ralph Lauren. But just how American is it? When ABC News looked at the labels, it found “made in China.” Every item in the uniforms that the U.S. athletes will be wearing at the opening ceremony in London will carry an overseas label.

✪ Agenda 21 Micro-Apartment Scheme Being Beta-Tested in NYC

The globalist design for micro-apartments is being championed by New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg. These “studio and one-bedroom apartments” will be no bigger than 275 to 300 sq ft. These tiny living spaces are smaller than currently allowed by building regulations, according to a statement by Bloomberg’s office; however the zoning regulations will be waived in over to construct the first of many compact pack ‘em and stack ‘em housing model in the city-owned area of Kips Bay.

A weird octopus with human head and female face caught by a fisherman in Padang, Indonesia. After showing the nature freak to the public and its pictures to be taken , he brought it home along with other octopus and squids to be cooked by his wife.

Because we don’t spend a large chunk of time up there, we haven’t done too much research on the long-term health effects of living on the moon. But a paper titled “Toxicity of Lunar Dust,” covering several aspects of the effects of moon dust on the human body, offers some insight: the moon is basically trying to kill you. Not actively, of course, but there are a lot of reasons to avoid the stuff (and no, a spacesuit isn’t going to save you). The big problem is inhalation; even with a suit, dust can end up back in suit-free living spaces. Then the dust can travel inside travelers’ lungs, causing inflammation and possibly, asbestos-style, even increasing the risk of developing cancer. The particles might be able to travel through the lungs more easily in the lower gravity environment, and exposure to UV and proton radiation could make the dust even more toxic.

✪ Marketers Track Retinas to Find What Draws Consumers

To find out what really draws their test shoppers’ attention, companies like Procter & Gamble Co., Unilever PLC and Kimberly-Clark Corp. are combining three-dimensional computer simulations of product designs and store layouts with eye-tracking technology. And that, in turn, is helping them roll out new products faster and come up with designs and shelf layouts that boost sales.

Mayhew called them “sewer hunters” or “toshers,” and the latter term has come to define the breed, though it actually had a rather wider application in Victorian times–the toshers sometimes worked the shoreline of the Thames rather than the sewers, and also waited at rubbish dumps when the contents of damaged houses were being burned and then sifted through the ashes for any items of value. They were mostly celebrated, nonetheless, for the living that the sewers gave them, which was enough to support a tribe of around 200 men–each of them known only by his nickname: Lanky Bill, Long Tom, One-eyed George, Short-armed Jack. The toshers earned a decent living; according to Mayhew’s informants, an average of six shillings a day–an amount equivalent to about $50 today.

The effort to depict drone warfare as some sort of courageous and noble act is intensifying: The Pentagon is considering awarding a Distinguished Warfare Medal to drone pilots who work on military bases often far removed from the battlefield. . . . [Army Institute of Heraldry chief Charles] Mugno said most combat decorations require “boots on the ground” in a combat zone, but he noted that “emerging technologies” such as drones and cyber combat missions are now handled by troops far removed from combat.

A German man opened the paper one morning to find a photo of himself identified as a wanted terrorist, in what seemed like a thriller plot turned into sinister reality. He still does not know who took the picture of him.

When it came to light that law enforcement has issued millions of annual requests/demands to the wireless carriers (AT&T;, Verizon, etc) to hand over user data, we all got a little concerned. Our carriers know everything about us, and according to findings by Rep. Markey (D-MA), “Information shared with law enforcement includes data such as geolocation information, content of text messages, wiretaps, among others.” But! We have weapons. Here are some tricks to help protect your privacy.

✪ ArtWalk Riot: Police vs Protesters over Sidewalk Chalk [Video]

The LAPD takes sidewalk chalk very seriously. Seriously enough to send 140 riot police to forcibly stop an Occupy LA group from drawing on the sidewalk during LA Artwalk. You can see eyewitness video below. 19 people were arrested after the police attacked the Chalk Walk demonstration with batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas.

“The often very aggressive prejudice against religion as backward, irrational and opposed to science is increasingly defining popular opinion,” said Michael Bongardt, a professor of ethics from Berlin’s Free University who added that the ruling reflected a profound lack of understanding in modern Germany for religious belief.

Explained AFA, “But that’s not the worst of it. Sears also sells books on bestiality and zoophilia. Titled ‘Dearest Pet, On Bestiality’ and “Bestiality and Zoophilia: Sexual Relations with Animals,’ these books are ‘how to’ manuals for people who want to have sex with animals.”

✪ Israel’s ‘Highless’ Marijuana & the CBD vs. THC Conundrum

The Israeli company responsible for developing Avidekel (pictured above), Tikun Olam, is not the first to breed a strain of cannabis that contains almost no THC at all. In 2005, GW Pharmaceuticals (creator of Sativex) grew “virtually mono-cannabinoidic plants that produce high percentages of these target cannabinoids: THC, CBD, THC-V, CBC, CBD-V, CBG or CBN.” Project CBD tested 17 different mothers of Cannatonic – a strain famous for its high CBD levels. Cannatonic #6 was high in CBD with hardly any THC, whereas the other plants were high in THC and low in CBD or high in both. Perhaps the great variety of results from different plants was because the Cannatonic strain is unstable, or perhaps people were getting different results from different growing conditions.

The 18-year-old said she was shopping when a man, who looked to be in his late 30s or early 40s, walked up and asked if her toenails were painted, according to a Columbia County Sheriff’s Office incident report. After replying yes and questioning why he wanted to know, the woman was asked if she’d watched America’s Funniest Home Videos. The man told her he was with the TV show and if she complied with his requests, everything she purchased that day would be free. She said she reluctantly agreed to let him take a photo of her foot. He asked if he could kiss her foot as part of the prank and she agreed. The man guided her to an area behind a clothing rack, dropped to the floor, grabbed her ankle and told her, “Don’t worry. I don’t bite.” He then started sucking on her big toe. The woman said she screamed at him to stop. Before the man ran from the store, he told her, “It tasted so good, though.” Thanks Jasmine

A Delaware company has hit Madonna and her label WB Records with a lawsuit claiming the pop star stole portions of one of their songs for her hit 1990 hit “Vogue,” reports E!. Pointing to a song called “Love Break,” released around 1977, VMG claims, “The portions of ‘Love Break,’ which have been copied into ‘Vogue’ and all its various ‘mixes,’ ‘remixes,’ videos, YouTube versions, etc., are numerous but intentionally hidden. The horn and strings in ‘Vogue’ are intentionally sampled from ‘Love Break’ throughout.” The company also says music producer Richard “Shep” Pettibone facilitated the process by altering the samples after he was originally hired by VMG to remix “Love Break,” later working on “Vogue.” “The unauthorized sampling was deliberately hidden by [Madonna] within ‘Vogue’ so as to avoid detection. It was only when VMG specifically looked for the sample, with the technology available to it in 2011, that the sampling could be confirmed,” VMG said.

A Bronx clothing designer says superstar Jay-Z and his former Roc-A-Fella record label partners owe him $7 million in unpaid royalties for designing the label logo, one of the best known symbols in rap music. In a copyright infringement suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court on Thursday, Dwayne Walker says he created the design. “The logo has become universally recognized as an iconic symbol of Jay-Z, one of the most successful recording artists in the history of popular music,” the suit says. It says Walker came up with the logo in 1995 when Roc-A-Fella was just starting out. The label is now a subsidiary of Universal Music Group.

A school bus driver who was convicted of assault for groping teens and women says an excessive intake of caffeine drove him to the acts. Kenneth Sands, 51, from Seattle, tried to use what is being called the caffeine defense at his sentencing on Tuesday. Sands had been convicted in Lewis County Superior Court of molesting three high school volleyball players and two women during and after a volleyball game in Onalaska on October 18, 2011. Sands says it was caffeine that had driven him to act out of character and that drinking too much caused a psychotic episode.

A study in the August edition of The Journal of School Health finds that the generations old theory of a “gateway drug” effect is in fact accurate for some drug users, but shifts the blame for those addicts’ escalating substance abuse away from marijuana and onto the most pervasive and socially accepted drug in American life: alcohol.

Unfortunately those who have been fantasizing about a romp in which layers of white cotton create the perfect sense of mystery (or bondage), exMormons offer few words of encouragement. Discomfort seems to be the predominant theme. I was continuously battling wedgies–often in public; how the people would stare as I would try to wrestle crumpled material out of my crack. Lady DB If you have ever worn the modern ones you should appreciate the distance these have come. When I first got married they came in a one piece get up with a wide neck so you could step into them. The back had a split crotch (not the kind in kinky panties) but this huge wide sloppy split that would separate under your clothes, leaving a draft in your nether region much of the time. The little panel they sew into the ladies special part was so poorly designed that it would roll and twist till you felt like you were skewered by a roll of old toilet paper.

Facebook and other social platforms are watching users’ chats for criminal activity and notifying police if any suspicious behavior is detected, according to a report. The screening process begins with scanning software that monitors chats for words or phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language. The software pays more attention to chats between users who don’t already have a well-established connection on the site and whose profile data indicate something may be wrong, such as a wide age gap. The scanning program is also “smart” — it’s taught to keep an eye out for certain phrases found in the previously obtained chat records from criminals including sexual predators. If the scanning software flags a suspicious chat exchange, it notifies Facebook security employees, who can then determine if police should be notified.

Pemberton tried it with another doctor and some friends on a Saturday in March of 2010. This is how he described the experience: A few minutes later, we were all sitting around in a euphoric haze, smiling benignly but with an incomprehensible, overwhelming desire to dance. It was nearly impossible to keep still. Then things became very vivid and real and everything everyone said suddenly became very important. Before we knew it we were piling into a cab, laughing and giggling uncontrollably and going to a club. The effects lasted for about another two hours …. I’d love to be able to tell you that I had a hideous time when I took mephedrone but the truth is, I didn’t. It was a lovely feeling and I can completely understand why people would use it.

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night counting sheep and thinking about the day I often wonder about: 1) ponies and 2) the fact that a bigger deal hasn’t been made about the fact Mitt Romney used to dress up like a police officer in college and pull people over. For fun. College is a time in many Americans’ lives when they do stupid shit like smoke too much pot, drink a lot, or have a lot of sex. That’s considered pretty “de rigueur” in college; these are kinks you work out of your system. You then leave said institution to go through the modern world paying your taxes and doing the right thing. But the GOP presidential candidate had a different gig: instead of drinking and smoking like the rest of America (he claims to have had “one sip” of beer and one drag of a cigarette his entire life, a number we don’t dispute), he would remain perfectly sober and put on a police uniform and pull people over.

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South Korea is saying this morning that its customs officials are stepping up their inspections targeting smuggled capsules that contain the powdered flesh of dead human babies. How’s that for something to wash down with your third cup of coffee this morning? The capsules originate in northeastern China, probably in Jilin province, which shares a border with North Korea. Since August, South Korean authorities have thwarted 35 smuggling attempts accounting for 17,450 capsules containing the powdered flesh of human babies whose bodies were “chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder,” the Associated Press reports.

CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.

The excited press painted grand pictures of such technology being used by consumers to see through walls and objects, while health professionals like physcians might incorporate the technology to seek out small tumors inside patients without the need for invasive surgery. THz radiation unzips the DNA molecule In a breakthrough study conducted by Dr. Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a team of physicists, they discovered terrifying evidence that exposure to THz radiation builds cumulatively and affects human and animal tissue DNA. In essence, it tends to unzip the DNA molecule. The Los Alamos scientists paper, DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field reveals very disturbing—even shocking—evidence that THz radiation significantly damages the DNA of the people being directed through airport scanners and all TSA workers in close proximity to the machines.

Dentists may soon be getting a potent new weapons with which to wage the global fight against cavities. The University of Maryland has developed a novel new nanocomposite material that can be used not only as filling for cavities, but that will also kill any remaining bacteria in the tooth and regenerate the actual structure lost to decay. The nanocomposite is made up of silver nanoparticles and calcium phosphate nanoparticles, both of which are piped into the tooth as filler for a cavity. The silver nanoparticles along with a few other ingredients in the material kill off whatever bacteria is still lingering inside the tooth, paving the way for the calcium phosphate to regenerate tooth minerals. Over time, the tooth strengthens again.

Kyle was sentenced to 37-and-a-half years in prison in March after pleading guilty of abusing the infant during several occasions in 2009, according to St Louis Today. Along with hundreds of child porn images on Kyle’s computers, investigators found information that led them to the St Louis area, where Kyle had visited Vanvlerah four times in five months since meeting online. During those visits, prosecutors say the pair had sex with the girl and each other at various hotels. Dr Kraushaar also told the court that the 22-year-old was so afraid of being rejected by others that she also allowed Kyle to choke, burn and urinate on her. ‘She is no longer Tessa’s plaything and she is no longer Tessa’s child’ Adoptive mother of victim, now three But prosecutors said Vanvlerah exercised free will when she started communicating online with Kyle and sharing child pornography. She also carved his name into her arm at his request but refused when he suggested bestiality.

It’s pretty easy to wear warm clothes on just about every part of your body except for your face. As far as I can tell, the main reason that cold-weather facial attire is somewhat socially taboo is because it generally obscures the identity of the person wearing it. Despite all of the progress our society has made towards accepting and treating all people fairly, we are still yet to escape the notion that a person in a balaclava (or ski mask) is generally up to no good. The “Identity Preserving Balaclava” is my solution to the social stigma associated with the identity concealing effect of the average balaclava. Here is the method and pattern that I used to make my own “Identity Preserving Balaclava.” Hopefully other people will be able to use this to liberate their cold faces from social repression!

Federal authorities who seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks gave it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired. The Los Angeles federal court records, which were unsealed Wednesday at the joint request of Wired, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Coalition, highlight a secret government process in which a judge granted the government repeated time extensions to build a civil or criminal case against Dajaz1.com, one of about 750 domains the government has seized in the last two years in a program known as Operation in Our Sites. Apparently, however, the RIAA and music labels’ evidence against Dajaz1, a music blog, never came.

A researcher has spotted lava flows shaped like coils of rope near the equator of Mars, the first time such geologic features have been discovered outside of Earth. These twisty volcanic patterns can be found on Hawaii’s Big Island and in the Pacific seafloor on our planet. While evidence for lava flows is present in many places on Mars, none are shaped like this latest find. “I was quite surprised and puzzled when I first saw the coils,” Andrew Ryan, a graduate student at Arizona State University, said in an email. He reported the discovery in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Then the researchers spotted some­thing particular about the males: they projected their testes outward, which endowed them with a certain “mouse swagger,” Erdman says. On measuring the males, they found that the testicles of the yogurt consumers were about 5 percent heavier than those of mice fed typical diets alone and around 15 percent heavier than those of junk-eating males.

Need to heat your planet? Install some dinosaurs. The biggest plant-eating dinosaurs pumped out huge amounts of greenhouse gas, helping to keep Earth toasty warm, according to new calculations. For much of the Mesozoic, the dinosaur era, the long-necked sauropods were one of the dominant groups. Like all herbivores, sauropods probably had gut bacteria to help them digest their food. “They were just containers for a lot of microbes,” says David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. The bacteria in the foreguts of herbivores like cows produce methane, which the animals belch out, contributing to climate change. Sauropods probably kept bacteria in their hindguts, and released methane in their farts.

A new wave of malware freezes a computer and demands payment to unlock it, this time falsely alleging victims have infringed copyright. The campaign, spotted by Roman Hussy, who authors the abuse.ch blog, targets users in the U.K., Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands. Hussy posted a screenshot of the warning that users in the U.K. would see. It bears the logos of the Performing Right Society (PRS), a royalties collection organization, and the Metropolitan Police. It falsely alleges that material protected by copyright has been found on the computer and subsequently has been moved to an encrypted folder “to prevent further damage.” “To unlock your computer and to avoid other legal consequences, you are obligated to pay a release fee of £50 (US$80),” it reads.

“Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant with SystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration issued an apology Wednesday to a California student who was picked up during a drug raid and left in a holding cell for several days without food, water or access to a toilet. DEA San Diego Acting Special Agent-In-Charge William R. Sherman said in a statement that he was troubled by the treatment of Daniel Chong and extended his “deepest apologies” to him. The agency is investigating how its agents forgot about Chong. Chong, 23, was never arrested, was not going to be charged with a crime and should have been released, said a law enforcement official who was briefed on the DEA case and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Chong told U-T San Diego that he drank his own urine to survive and that he bit into his glasses to break them and tried to use a shard to scratch “Sorry Mom” into his arm.

✖ Boy, 11, urinates on $36K worth of Apple MacBooks

He had the means and the opportunity, but we may never know the motive of an 11-year-old student who urinated on a couple dozen laptops left unattended at Upper Allen Township Elementary in Pennsylvania. In a report now bemusing Mac fan forums across the Internet, the Upper Allen Township Police Department states that “the cart and computers were damaged beyond repair, resulting in the loss of over $36,000.” The cart in question contained approximately 30 school-owned MacBooks, according to a police department spokesperson I spoke to, who couldn’t tell me why the kid did it — let alone how. Because, c’mon — 30 MacBooks, even stacked, make for a formidable amount of square footage to cover, especially for a kid.

Yesterday, Wuhan Zoo Monkey caretaker Zhang Bangsheng unbelievably used his tongue to lick a small monkey’s butt! 50-year-old Zhang Bangsheng used warm water to clean a small Francois’ Leaf Monkey’s buttocks, then began using his mouth to lick it, not stopping for over an hour, until the little monkey defecated a single peanut. Only after the peanut was defecated did Zhang Bangsheng laugh with satisfaction.

Police in north-east Indiana say a man who drove three blocks with four children strapped to the hood of his car has been arrested on a drunken driving charge. Fort Wayne police spokesman John Chambers says a witness called police Monday evening after seeing a man and woman strap the kids to the car in a liquor store parking lot, then drive away.

A mother has been charged with incest after she was found in hotel room with her teenage son along with videos of them having sex. Police said the 16-year-old had videos on his cell phone that showed his mother Mistie Atkinson performing oral sex on him. They also recovered nude photographs the 32-year-old had sent her son as she began the illicit relationship earlier this year. Thanks Jasmine

“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.” “Again?” someone said. We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks. “Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

Cops said they caught the distinctively thin and afro-wearing Amos on surveillance video dumping what was believed to be the accumulated waste of protesters down an outdoor staircase outside JP Morgan Chase at Nassau and Cedar Streets. Further biological warfare was committed inside a Chase ATM vestibule on Water Street.

Uncle Sam a drug pusher? It’s true. For the past three decades, a handful of Americans have been getting regular deliveries of high-grade marijuana, courtesy of the federal government. It’s all part of the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program, a little-known initiative that grew out of a 1976 court decision that created the nation’s first legal pot smokers. Of the 14 people who were in the program initially, four are still alive.

Non-penetrative sex or outercourse (which includes frottage, heavy petting and mutual masturbation) is sexual activity without vaginal, anal, or oral penetration, as opposed to the penetrative aspects of those activities. Non-penetrative sex is often considered a form of safer sex and birth control, as it is less likely that bodily fluids are exchanged.

Vatican staffers who have been leaking embarrassing letters about corruption and nepotism inside the tiny city state are to be hunted down by a crack squad of cardinals led by a senior member of the religious group Opus Dei. Irritated by the anonymous release of documents to the press this year, Pope Benedict has named Cardinal Julian Herranz, 82, to lead a three-man team which will haul in staffers for questioning and rifle through files until they catch the perpetrators of what has been dubbed “Vatileaks”. A short statement printed on Thursday on the front page of the Vatican’s daily newspaper warned the team had a full “pontifical mandate” to “shed complete light” on the whistle blowers, who have lifted the lid on alleged theft and false accounting.

This video shows Andrew Barnes opening a woman’s sexual energy channels. This type of energy work enables women and men to connect to their bodies sexual energetic system and to let go of resistance to experience more bliss in their life. If we know sexuality as an intuitive meditation, it transforms into a gateway, opening to a deeper level of energetic experience, and an expansion of consciousness. With this, a knowing of deep love for self and others that transcends personal relations returns, becoming a reunion back to the ultimate source of creation, and a realisation that we are one. The time for planetary consciousness is now”

LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK TWP. — An “unusual event” was declared at the Salem 1 nuclear reactor here this morning after the plant shut down and fire alarms sounded, a spokesman for the plant’s operator said. An unusual event is the least serious of four emergency classifications at a nuclear power plant. Salem 1 automatically shut down at 10:15 a.m., according to Joe Delmar, spokesman for the reactor’s operator, PSEG Nuclear. According to Delmar what caused the reactor to trip remains under investigation, but testing was occurring on the reactor’s emergency cooling system at the time.

Last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Despite public opinion, the medical community, and human rights experts all moving in favor of relaxing marijuana prohibition laws, little has changed in terms of policy. There have been many great books and articles detailing the history of the drug war. Part of America’s fixation with keeping the leafy green plant illegal is rooted in cultural and political clashes from the past. However, we at Republic Report think it’s worth showing that there are entrenched interest groups that are spending large sums of money to keep our broken drug laws on the books:

A recent study has found that people can have memories of events that never occurred implanted in a laboratory setting, even when they know that it never actually happened. Combining these findings with the reality of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) hallucination-inducing technology and you have the potential for both the reliability of our memory and perception to be manipulated and thus become completely unreliable.

Comstock’s ideas did not come out of the clear blue sky. The fear of pornography was closely related to the ongoing mania against masturbation. Comstock himself had masturbated so furiously in his youth that he believed he might be driven to suicide. His own experiences seem to have strongly influenced his later work. In his book Frauds Exposed, he wrote that obscenity is like a cancer: It “fastens itself upon the imagination . . .defiling the mind, corrupting the thoughts, leading to secret practices of most foul and revolting character, until the victim tires of life and existence is scarcely endurable.” He warned: “Every new generation of youth is sent into the world as sheep in the midst of wolves. Traps are laid for them in every direction . . . [O]nce in the trap, the victim will love it and press greedily forward.” Few at the time disagreed that masturbation caused insanity, sickness, and death. Well-meaning parents everywhere were warned to look for signs of self-pollution

If you take Adam Harvey’s advice, here’s what you might wanna wear to a party this weekend: A funny hat, asymmetrical glasses, a tuft of hair that dangles off your nose bridge and, most likely, a black-and-white triangle taped to your cheekbone. Optional: Cubic makeup patterns all around your eyes.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically. In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.

The largest sperm bank in Britain is under investigation from health officials over claims they used sperm from the wrong donor after a gay couple had two children from different racial backgrounds. The alleged mix-up at the IVF clinic only emerged after the birth of the couple’s second child, who is of different race to the rest of the family. The parents are said to be “devastated” at the alleged mistake as they had wanted their children to be genetically related by using the same sperm donor, The (London) Sunday Times reported.

Jurors also were asked to decide whether the videos, some of which depicted fetishes involving feces, violated standards of what is acceptable to the community at large. In all three trials, jurors had to watch a series of explicit videos in entirety. Isaacs has maintained his work is an extreme but constitutionally protected form of art, but he hasn’t been supported by others in the porn industry.

✖ KFC ordered to pay $8.3 million to Australian girl

Fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken has been ordered to pay Aus$8 million (US$8.3 million) to an Australian girl who suffered severe brain damage and was paralysed after eating a Twister wrap. Monika Samaan was seven when she suffered salmonella encephalopathy — a brain injury linked to food poisoning that also left her with a blood infection and septic shock — in October 2005. Several other family members also fell ill and they claimed Samaan’s injuries, which include severe cognitive, motor and speech impairment and spastic quadriplegia, were caused by a chicken Twister wrap from a Sydney KFC outlet.

A Pakistani human rights lawyer says over 2,800 of the 3,000 people killed over the past seven years in non-UN-sanctioned U.S. assassination drone strikes in Pakistan were civilians. Shahzad Akbar, the director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, told Press TV on Saturday that only 170 of the people killed in the aerial attacks on the northwestern tribal belt of Pakistan have been identified as militants.

A SWISS woman starved to death after believing she could survive on light alone. Sign up for your free 2 month trial The woman embarked on the diet after watching the controversial 2010 documentary film “In the beginning there was light,” newspaper Tages Anzeiger said today. The movie centres on Swiss chemistry doctor Michael Werner, 62, and 83-year-old Indian yogi Prahlad Jani, who both claim to derive sustenance from spiritual means rather than the intake of food – a concept also known as breatharianism.

after his brain was damaged in a brutal attack by muggers. Jason Padgett, 41, was left concussed after he was ambushed outside a karaoke club and repeatedly kicked in the head. Now, wherever he looks, he sees mathematical formulas and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He is the only person in the world known to have the skill and experts say it was caused by his head injury. They believe the damage to Mr Padgett’s brain has left him with a ‘remarkable gift’ for figures, much like the brilliant mathematician John Nash.

“The inmate is locked up on a six-year sentence for a violation of probation on aggravated burglary and theft convictions. Judging from his Facebook page, he’s doing anything but hard time behind bars. Sneaking in a cell phone inside a penal facility like the Shelby County Corrections Center is a big deal, but what else he has his hands on is almost unbelievable. In one of the video clips the inmate says, “I’m going to give ya’ll an episode, a preview of all this scrumptious items that we got that we eat on a daily basis.”” – News Channel 3

The Corrections Corporation of America’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission read very much like the documents of a slave-trader. Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines. That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line. Dangers to profitability include “relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” The corporation spells it out: “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.

Italy appears to have a particular artisanal flair for the printing arts, even though the authorities have also found illicit euro operations in France, Spain, Eastern Europe and South America. Its most accomplished practitioners can be found in and around Giugliano, where concrete-block apartments abut orchards and car dealerships, and young African prostitutes stand amid the rushes on unkempt roads. “In Italy, there’s a great, ancient and august tradition: Here, they make fake money, done well,” said Col. Alessandro Gentili, the head of the Italian Carabinieri’s Currency Anti-Counterfeiting Unit in Rome. “Giugliano is still the capital. It has the best professionals.” Quite a number of them, as it turns out. When the police rolled up some of the counterfeiting operations around Giugliano as well as in the Calabria region farther south in January 2009, they raided 162 locations and arrested 109 people, seizing a mountain of illicit materials.

There are lots of thieves in China, and they are all very brave! In the following, we will have two videos to show you how those professional thieves using a pair of chopsticks to steal people’s mobile phone

For a reason or reasons unknown, but possibly explained by the lighter and what may or may not be a baggie of contraband on his lap, 21-year-old Steven Mulhall stole Judge Michael Orlando’s nameplate from the door of the judge’s courtroom in Broward County, Florida. At some point thereafter, Mulhall posed for this picture with his prize, and his girlfriend appears to have posted it on Facebook. (They are only the latest in a growing horde of people who don’t seem to understand that by posting things on the “Internet,” you make them “public,” thus creating potentially incriminating “evidence.”) A tipster told police about the photo and gave them Mulhall’s name and address.

Police arrested 52-year-old Dr. Anthony Monteleone on Wednesday in the back parking lot of his office. They say he was caught snorting lines of suspected cocaine and then going inside Katsur Dental and Orthodontics in Edgewood to treat his patients. Undercover agents grabbed Monteleone after they witnessed him using what appeared to be cocaine. “There was a police officer observing what appeared to be drug use,” Edgewood Police Chief Robert Payne said. “It was outside the car.” Chief Payne, who made the arrest, asked Dr. Monteleone if he had a problem. The doctor, according to the criminal complaint, admitted to using marijuana, Xanax and cocaine.

The art world’s most intriguingly anonymous character, Banksy, is known for appropriating all sorts of outdoor and arguably “public” spaces. Who else does that? The advertising industry of course. I think one has to agree with his sentiments, albeit with a wry smile given his own predilection for placing his art in places our eyeballs can’t avoid. Here’s his statement

The Hopkins group that Johnson is part of has been investigating the use of psilocybin, the hallucinogen in “magic mushrooms,” for smoking cessation and to help terminal cancer patients cope with their illness. They’ve also taken a look at Salvinorin A, a hallucinogen in salvia, too. Why would hallucinogens be suited for these kinds of treatments? Johnson said people taking the drugs in the studies he’s helped with report that it is “one of the most meaningful experiences — or the most meaningful — in their life.” Some says the “trip” changes the direction of their lives and can trigger a redefinition of how they see themselves. That could be as profound as, “I’m now a nondrinker, or whatever the adciction may be,” he said.

✖ The Language of Persuasion – Government Or Regime?

“Police are warning that when cannabis plants reach the final stages of maturity the odour they release has carcinogenic properties. “Officers who deal with the plants use ventilation masks and protective suits and people who have plants in their home, especially anyone with young children, may be exposing their family to a health risk.”

✖ From Road Salt to Pink Goo, What’s In the Food?

In the modern-day world in which we live you never really know to what extent the corrupt globalists will go to profiteer from adding deadly poisons, toxins, drugs, and chemicals to our food and water supply. Not only do we have to pay attention as consumers to fluoride levels in our drinking water, now we must watch for a whole slew of toxic and gruesome additives in the foods we eat.

Neil Hope grew up in the 1980s before an audience of millions as a star in a pair of gritty Canadian television dramas, “Degrassi Junior High” and its sequel, “Degrassi High.” The shows were cultural touchstones in Canada and cult favorites in the United States, where they anticipated teenage docudramas like MTV’s “Real World” and soaps like “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

The researchers found that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates. The brains of honeybees that were more likely than others to seek adventure exhibited distinct patterns of gene activity in molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans. The findings present a new perspective on honeybee communities, which were thought to be highly regimented and comprised of a colony of interchangeable workers taking on a few specific roles to serve their queen. It now seems as though individual honeybees differ in their desire to perform particular tasks and these differences could be down to variability in bees’ personalities. This supports a 2011 study at Newcastle University that suggested that honeybees exhibit pessimism, suggesting that insects might have feelings.

Being a Nazi, this public servant obviously didn’t miss an opportunity to couch as many of these regulations as he could in racist or anti-Semitic terms. Such, after all, are the National Socialist equivalent of soothing conventional wisdom. But that’s just it: If you’re a Nazi, and you can pass something you don’t like off as a “Negroid excess,” or a manifestation of “Jewish Fremason-ry,” it helps you with the kind of Nazi cred you need insulate yourself from having to justify what’s wrong with the music as music. More than that, it helps you hide your fear of the deeper resonance the music has with people as people. In an interview given in Prague in 1968, relayed in Talkin’ Moscow Blues, Skvorecky noted that “jazz is, above all, a kind of fraternity.” That’s not an entirely obvious thought if you come from the same part of the world jazz itself does.

Keeping the artificial intelligence genie trapped in the proverbial bottle could turn an apocalyptic threat into a powerful oracle that solves humanity’s problems, said Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. But successful containment requires careful planning so that a clever breed of artificial intelligence cannot simply threaten, bribe, seduce or hack its way to freedom. “It can discover new attack pathways, launch sophisticated social-engineering attacks and re-use existing hardware components in unforeseen ways,” Yampolskiy said. “Such software is not limited to infecting computers and networks — it can also attack human psyches, bribe, blackmail and brainwash those who come in contact with it.”

The TSA is clearly no fan of the 4th Amendment, nor of 5th Amendment due process rights, and now this blatant attempt to manipulate the free press with “strong caution” hits at Amendment the First. Why strong caution? Are there repercussions for journalists that fail to heed this “advice?” Because, you know, if I were a member of the free press and the federal government asked me to censor myself, I’d happily comply . . . . . . . . . riiight. I have news for the federal government: Americans will not take censorship in any form. We thought we made this clear when you tried to force SOPA on us.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Setting your Facebook page to “friends only” and your Twitter feed to private is a good idea, especially if you’re hunting for a job or trying to get into the college of your choice. You want to be selective in the details you reveal about yourself and, quite frankly, what you post on a social network is none of their damned business. But it appears even that may not be enough to protect you any more. Bob Sullivan of MSNBC reports that some state agencies and colleges are forcing prospective employees and students to grant them full access to their social networks.

✖ Kony 2012 Hoax Exposed

Kony 2012 is but another piece of slick propaganda designed to tug on the heart strings – and the purse strings – of ignorant Americans who are clueless about the real reasons why the globalists are now moving into Africa in a big way. Invisible Children’s connections to USAID and thus the CIA should put the effort in context. Africa is one of several targets prized by the globalists as they move to grab vital natural resources, consolidate power and unleash their monetary enslavement and world totalitarian government end game around the globe.

Today is an incredibly sad day for fans of comic books, concept art, and downright anything science fiction. Artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, who provided some of the most stunning scifi and fantasy art ever to grace a page, has succumbed to illness at the age of 73. It’s pretty hard to overstate the hand Moebius had in some of science fiction’s most phantasmagoric cinema. You know his work even if you’ve never realized it. In addition to providing preliminary designs for such films as Alien, Tron, The Abyss, Masters of the Universe, The Fifth Element, and Willow (which were awesome albeit unused), the artist provided concept art for El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-realized Dune adaptation, which was to star Mick Jagger and boast a soundtrack by Pink Floyd.

In the New Yorker article, Jane Mayer quotes you as saying, “I actually had hopes for Obama.” What’s your opinion on the Obama administration’s stated support for whistle-blowers and, more generally, his counterterrorism record? Worse than Bush. I have to say that. I actually voted for Obama. It’s all rhetoric for me now. As Americans we were hoodwinked. He’s expanding the secrecy regime far beyond what the Bush even intended, interestingly enough. I think Bush is probably like, “Whoa.”

In October, Mother Jones revealed that the FBI is notorious for creating supposed terrorist groups from scratch and then framing patsies in order to claim the government is protecting the United States from terrorists and also breathe life into an otherwise moribund war on mostly nonexistent terrorism. Sabu’s role as an FBI provocateur working inside LulzSec reveals the government is attempting to do the same in order to push its so-called cybersecurity agenda. The establishment is eager to pass a raft of legislation to closely regulate the internet, strip the medium of its anonymity, and close it down as an activism and alternative media tool.

That is what the census says. Andrew Leonard in Salon notes that it is a bit misleading, that “4.7 million are for “seasonal use” only, the Census tells us — unoccupied vacation homes, in other words. 4.1 million are for rent, 2.3 million are for sale, and the remaining 7.5 million “were vacant for a variety of other reasons.” The census also lists the total number of homeless in America as 759,101, so there are 24 empty houses for every homeless person in America. What a shocking misallocation of resources, materials and energy.

Gerald Zirnstein grinds his own hamburger these days. Why? Because this former United States Department of Agriculture scientist and, now, whistleblower, knows that 70 percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls “pink slime.” “Pink slime” is beef trimmings. Once only used in dog food and cooking oil, the trimmings are now sprayed with ammonia so they are safe to eat and added to most ground beef as a cheaper filler. It was Zirnstein who, in an USDA memo, first coined the term “pink slime” and is now coming forward to say he won’t buy it. “It’s economic fraud,” he told ABC News. “It’s not fresh ground beef. … It’s a cheap substitute being added in.”

This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort. The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.

Planned Parenthood exposes children to sexual material in order to seed a generation of sex addicts, who will become future customers for the abortion giant. This report exposes Planned Parenthood’s sex-education programs, using images from Planned Parenthood’s own websites, social networks, and events.

The secret’s out: Men are wearing tights. Pantyhose for men, or “mantyhose,” have been popular throughout Europe for years and now the trend – even outside the ballet barre – has crept stateside.

Today’s leading cola beverages contain high levels of a substance linked to cancer in animals, according to new research. An independent study commissioned by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) uncovered 4-methylimidazole, or 4-MI, in Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi and Diet Pepsi at levels 4.8 times greater than those allowed in beverages in California. 4-MI is a byproduct of the reaction that produces the caramel coloring in brown sodas. The chemical has been found to be carcinogenic in animal studies. The state of California has banned 4-MI in any amount that could potentially lead to one cancer case in 100,000 people. However the levels found in these 4 leading Cola brands indicated a lifetime risk of 5 cancers out of 100,000, assuming that people drink one soft drink per day. That risk rises to 10 cancers out of 100,000 people who drink only soft drinks containing caramel coloring.

Anderson Cooper attempted, and miserably failed, to mitigate the damage from the discovery that one of the poster boys for foreign intervention in Syria was manufacturing complete propaganda for Western consumption. The video below is the original video exposing “Danny” as a vicious propagandist actively working against the interests of the Syrian people. This is just more exploitation of the good intentions of people around the world for nefarious ends. These revelations further damage the credibility of the already highly untrustworthy Syrian rebels, much like the Libyan rebels delegitimized themselves. Stay weary of the effort to push us into military intervention in Syria and question all sources of information and the “statistics” we are fed by the Western establishment media. Keep in mind none of this is confirmed, the sources have a political interest in disseminating disinformation and so do those who report the claims made by so-called activists as gospel.

Two Cambridge graduates have thought of a clever way of making enough money to pay the debts they built up attending university. Facing a combined bill of £50,000 ($80,000), Ed Moyse and Ross Harper started a business called Buy My Face. The product: advertising space on their faces. The pair started by selling the space to family and friends for just £1-per-day, but the price is now up to £400-per-day.they even have a sponsor in Ernst & Young. They started the business last October and it appears to still be going strong.

A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth, Ohio oil and gas regulators said Friday as they announced a series of tough new regulations for drillers.

The HIV rate among black women living in some U.S. cities is the same rate as that of some African countries, according to a new multicenter study presented Thursday at the 19th Conference of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The jarring findings acknowledge that HIV is not an infection that has been eradicated, but one that has been somewhat forgotten, researchers said. The new data come from the ISIS study (The Women’s HIV Seroincidence Study), and reflect an analysis of at-risk women in six urban areas of the United States that have some of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS: Baltimore, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Washington, D.C., Newark and New York City. “This disease is alive and well in this country,” said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, principal investigator for the Atlanta area of the study and professor of medicine and infectious disease at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “But this epidemic is the face of the forgotten people.”

A new condom that aims to enhance erections may also lift earnings and buyout prospects for unprofitable U.K. drugmaker Futura Medical Plc. Durex condoms made by partner Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc will contain a dose of Futura’s Zanifil gel inside the tip, boosting blood flow within the penis. The product results in firmer, larger and longer-lasting erections for men who may find wearing condoms challenging, according to Futura.

Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova are accused of hooliganism over the incident last month in which four members of the group cavorted and shouted a song protesting against the rule of Vladimir Putin in front of the iconostasis of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Mr Putin’s spokesman has described the performance as “disgusting” and said the prime minister and president-elect regarded it “negatively”. The two young women were arrested the night before Mr Putin won a third term in the Kremlin on Sunday, and have been remanded in custody until a trial next month. Pussy Riot formed in October last year and has focused on guerrilla activism against Putin, including an impromptu concert on Red Square. Its members use pseudonyms and wear brightly-coloured balaclavas and clothes for performances and interviews.

Rumors started among students, and then instructors, about the teacher’s alter persona before it came to the attention of Haydock Intermediate School officials. The district superintendent told KCAL9 that the videos do not involve any Oxnard school district students. According to a written notice sent to parents Tuesday, the school says the teacher does not face any criminal charges but has been placed on administrative leave: Oxnard Middle School Teacher Pulled From Classroom Amid Rumors Shes Working As Hard Core Porn Actress (credit: CBS) “It has been alleged that one of our teachers is depicted in at least one pornographic video and possibly others on the internet…These sites contain extremely graphic and inappropriate pornographic material.”The notice also warns parents to keep students away from social media sites, inappropriate outside networks and smartphones. The 30-year-old instructor’s identity has been withheld while the allegations are being investigated.

The issue that should have sparked panic in the survey is the total consensus among Israeli Jews – regardless of religious, ethnic or political differences – that the “guiding principle” for the country and for Judaism itself is “to remember the Holocaust.” Ninety-eight percent of the respondents consider it either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.

Students were told they were taking part in a study of how funds should be distributed in college – and offered a range of ethnic-based groups to share money between. After listening to Bruce Springsteen and the White Stripes, the students handed most of the money to white people. ‘Rock music is generally associated with white Americans, so we believe it cues white listeners to think about their positive association with their own in-group,’ said Heather LaMarre, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota. ‘That was enough for them to show more support for a student group representing mostly whites.’ After listening to Top 40 pop such as Gwen Stefani, Akon and Fergie, the students divided money more equally between white people, black people and latinos.

A commonly prescribed drug used to treat high blood pressure may have the unintended benefit of muting racist thoughts in those who take it. A new Oxford University research study found that Propranolol, which works to combat high blood pressure, anxiety, migraines, and a number of heart ailments, affects the same part of the central nervous system that regulates subconscious attitudes on race.

✖ Pat Robertson: Pot should be legal like alcohol

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs has failed. The outspoken evangelical Christian and host of “The 700 Club” on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network he founded said the war on drugs is costing taxpayers billions of dollars. He said people should not be sent to prison for marijuana possession. The 81-year-old first became a self-proclaimed “hero of the hippie culture” in 2010 when he called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions.

They call him “Twenty-Four.” Yoandri Hernandez Garrido’s nickname comes from the six perfectly formed fingers on each of his hands and the six impeccable toes on each foot. Hernandez is proud of his extra digits and calls them a blessing, saying they set him apart and enable him to make a living by scrambling up palm trees to cut coconuts and posing for photographs in this eastern Cuban city popular with tourists. One traveler paid $10 for a picture with him, Hernandez said, a bonanza in a country with an average salary of just $20 a month. “It’s thanks to my 24 digits that I’m able to make a living, because I have no fixed job,” Hernandez said.

✖ Celebrities with STDs – Famous People with STDs – STIs – VD

Famous Celebrities with Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) Welcome to the celebrities section of the STD Carrier Registry. Here you can browse our list of idolized (and not so idolized) people from Hollywood, professional sports, pornography, politics, literary writing, activism, and other notable segments of society. All celebs on the list correspond to detailed profiles containing pictures, some videos, and references to news reports.

Love is supposed to be everlasting. Unfortunately for many, the only permanent thing to come out of a relationship is an incurable sexually transmitted disease. And that’s why Cyrus Sullivan, of Portland, Ore., claims that he runs STD Carriers Disease Control and Prevention Services, a website that lists claimed and confirmed carriers by their names, locations, descriptions, and sometimes their photos. The database is completely open to the public — you don’t have to login to browse the listings, and many of the recently added carriers’ pics are displayed prominently on the site’s front page. Users submit photos freely. There are about 1,500 listings.

Watch out Facebook and Foursquare: there’s a new site that allows users to “check-in” when they are having, uh… protected sex! There’s a new batch of condoms with wrappers equipped with a QR code – a scannable barcode – giving users the ability to “check-in” when they use the contraceptive, according to Planned Parenthood. After scanning the QR code, users check in on wheredidyouwearit.com. The website displays an interactive map showing where users have checked in at. Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest (PPGNW) released 55,000 condoms to colleges and universities in Washington state in honor of National Condom Week, which was Feb. 14 to Feb. 21.

It shows a couple of fights, one between two women just outside the mall that was broken up by a mall security guard and another inside the mall between what appears to be young males. In one scene, a man is knocked to the mall floor and appears unconscious. Other males can be seen running. After the incident, stores were briefly on lockdown and the video shows frightened shoppers trying to exit the mall. In December, police said they arrested three people in connection with the fights.

Lafayette said she was inside her home taking a nap on Saturday when someone knocked on her door. When she stepped outside, several Newton County deputies were in her yard. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me that the dogs got out,'” she said. She was worried her dogs got out and attacked someone. “A deputy told me I didn’t do anything wrong, I was the victim. I said, ‘Victim!’ I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, did someone kill my dog?’ He said, ‘No the neighbor behind you, they saw the teenager having sex with your female dogs.’ I said, ‘Having sex with my female dogs?’ I think they must have got it wrong,” said Lafayette. Lafayette didn’t believe them until they showed her the video her neighbors recorded. “And it showed him on his knees inside the kennel with my dog. He was on his knees like he was a dog,” said Lafayette. Police arrested 19-year old Bernard Archer and charged him with two counts of bestiality

Three male teachers at a US high school have been arrested and charged on suspicion of child seduction after admitted to passing around a 16-year-old student. Officials were called in after the male student revealed on 18 January the school band director, a swimming coach and a substitute Spanish teacher all engaged in physical relationships with him several times on school grounds. The boy, who cannot be name for legal reasons, claimed that many of the alleged acts, which range from touching and kissing to having sex in a car, took place on the grounds of North Putnam High School in Roachdale, central Indiana. According to Indiana state police, those arrested and charged were: substitute Spanish teacher Nicholas Vester, 24, who worked at the school for 12 weeks last autumn; band director Craig Rogers, 24, currently on paid leave; and volunteer swimming coach Brandon Largent, 20, a student at Ivy Tech community college.

For the last two years, the young girl never used make-up removers, so her mother, exasperated by Bae’s behaviour, contacted a TV station and told them Bae’s incredible story. During a variety show, dermatologists managed to convince Bae Dal-mi to finally remove the layers of make-up, and after a specialized check-up they found her skin was two times older than her actual age. All because of an obsession with beauty

A faulty battery caused an electronic cigarette to explode in a man’s mouth, taking out some of his front teeth, a chunk of his tongue and severely burning his face, fire officials said.

The Guinness World record was 250. Janine Keblish topped that by two pairs of underwear. Why? Keblish wanted to bring attention to a cause she’s involved with, Days for Girls. A few years ago Keblish and Celeste Mergens discovered a shameful secret on a trip to an orphanage in Kenya – a total lack of feminine hygiene products for young women. “Millions of women all over the world go without, resulting in infection and exploitation and even girls being sold into slavery. They also miss three months of education each year, just for lack of hygiene,” says Mergens. “And you wonder, how could this be happening in this day and age? The truth is, it’s taboo to talk about.”

The high incidence of open defecation in the Indian state of Bihar is not due to a lack awareness about toilets, according to this new Water for People video. In their view, it’s more of a supply chain, marketing problem. The toilets on offer are not particularly good.

It’s not every day that you receive a coupon for one of the priciest beverage chains in the world! Armed with my Starbucks Rewards card, I decided to take the opportunity to find out just how much money I could pour into a Trenta—Starbucks’ whopping 31 ounce cup! After about a half-hour with a laughing barista, we created the most expensive drink possible: one Java Chip Frappuccino in a Trenta cup, 16 shots of espresso, a shot of soy milk, caramel flavoring, banana puree, strawberry puree, vanilla beans, Matcha powder, protein powder, and a drizzle of caramel and mocha. Price: $23.60. The resulting beverage contains 1400mg of caffeine. According to Erowid, a widely respected drug catalog, a heavy caffeine dose is 400+mg. This drink has 3 times that. If I drank this all at once, it would put me in the hospital. Two of these would kill me.

Many strange archeological discoveries have been made in modern history. Hundreds of artifacts have been unearthed that have baffled scientists and challenged modern man’s view of history. Many of these objects have been labeled out of place artifacts or anachronisms. These archeological discoveries are always controversial and the scientific community is extremely selective in what they accept as fact. Every object on this list has been accused of being an elaborate hoax. In many cases, a conspiracy is the only explanation, without an extensive rewriting of the world’s history books. These artifacts tell a story of ancient civilizations, Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contracts, and mysterious technological advancements. Many of these archeological discoveries challenge the scientific theory of evolution, as well as many religious beliefs.

✰ Elderly junkies find ‘freedom’ at Dutch old-age home

In a tiny fourth-floor room overlooking The Hague’s city centre, a grey-haired man carefully plugged a small pipe with a ball of cocaine, lit up and drew a deep breath. “This is real freedom,” said 65-year-old William as a billow of white smoke poured from his nostrils and wafted through his apartment at Woodstock, the only Dutch home for elderly junkies and other addicts. The apartment block, flanked by a canal and a tram line, takes a unique approach to drug abuse by helping to keep ageing homeless people off the city’s streets and out of trouble with the law. “I like it here. Here there is no police watching you,” William told AFP as he rearranged the paraphernalia of his addiction on a small table: a pipe, a lighter, a mirror with traces of cocaine lines and an old credit card. “I can do what I want to do.”

✰ NH town to vote on whether to change name of pond at bishop’s urging

Voters in a small New Hampshire town will have the final say on whether to change the controversial name of a local pond. The small pond near the middle of Mont Vernon is known as Jew Pond. Town officials say it got its name back in the 1920s because the operators of a hotel that once stood next to it were Jewish. The name recently got the attention of New Hampshire Bishop Peter Libasci. He wrote a letter to the local newspaper saying the name conveyed contempt and urged townspeople to change it. Residents will decide in the March 13 election. Some residents told WMUR-TV that they don’t find the name offensive and that it’s part of the town’s history.

✰ Exposing the Severity of the Fukushima Disaster (Video)

Fukushima has had 5 major meltdowns now, in a disaster that is making experts say that it is larger than Chernobyl. Aljazeera reported in September that the radiation emitted from Fukushima would rival or surpass Chernobyl in only the weeks following the disaster. According to Aljazeera: “Experts say that the total radiation leaked will eventually exceed the amounts released from the Chernobyl disaster that the Ukraine in April 1986. This amount would make Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.” This news was from 2011, but the current news isn’t much better. After officials said they were going to perform a ‘cold shutdown’ to prevent any further issues, its now come out that the Fukushima reactor temperature now surpasses 752 degrees — whereas 100 degrees celsius was required for the cold shutdown. Tepco, the operators of the plant, say the thermometer is conveniently broken, but they have been known to conceal the truth from the public in the past.

The fight occurred between residents of a tenement with shared facilities, a common situation in India’s densely populated financial matrix. The incident brings India’s sanitation problems and the lack of proper facilities sharply into focus. Simon Lingeree was killed last month when he got into a heated argument with Santosh Kargutkar while using a public toilet. The latter became highly impatient while waiting his turn. When Mr. Lingeree exited the toilet, he was physically assaulted. There were no weapons involved, just fists, but the young man was struck a fatal blow to the crotch. The killer quickly fled the scene and was later arrested.

The strong odor of marijuana from the evidence room at a local police station in Florida seems to be a real problem for some whiny cops. “The biggest complaint is how strong the odor is,” said Atlantic Beach Police Commander Victor Gualillo, reports ActionNewsJax.com. All seized dope collected during busts is stored in a 200-square-foot evidence room at the station. “Anytime you store that much marijuana it’s rather pungent,” Commander Gualillo complained. But it seems you count on this bunch of overwrought weenies to dramatize the situation way beyond just the smell. They’re talking about “doing something” before “somebody gets hurt.” “I’m told there are serious health concerns,” claimed Atlantic Beach City Manager Jim Hanson about all the collected drugs in the evidence room. “There are other evidence technicians who have gotten sick,” Hanson claimed.

Adrian Watson, 41, was arrested by police after neighbours complained of a strong smell of gas coming from a house in Huddersfield Road, Elland. Bradford Crown Court heard how officers at first thought there may have been a leak, but after entering the property found 24 cannabis plants and growing equipment. They also found documents in the house with Watson’s name on and another address in Dewsbury Road, Elland, where they later found Watson as well as more cannabis. A total of 2.24kg of the drug was found, with a street value of around £19,000. Police experts believe there was enough cannabis to last up to 594 days, but Watson told police that his habit of 15 joints a day meant he would have got through the drug much quicker. He admitted producing cannabis for personal use.

News has come from France that some captive-born dolphins there have been recorded “talking in their sleep” — and talking in Whale, no less, not Dolphinese. The scientists involved say this would be the first time that dolphins have been recorded mimicking sounds a significant period of time after hearing them. But there’s also the intriguing possibility that these sounds — virtually identical to sounds made by the humpback whale — may, if the dolphins are really asleep and not just resting, be direct expression of something the dolphins are dreaming.

“The sale of drugs (like K-72 and K-76) which have cobra venom is increasing at rave parties and in discos. These drugs enhance sensation and boost energy so that revellers can dance for longer hours,” a senior officer of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) told IANS on condition of anonymity. “The sales increase a week before Valentine’s Day in Delhi and NCR (National Capital Region) and are consumed at hushed-up parties,” he added.

✰ Morgellons: Static Electricity or Moving Nano-Machines? You Decide

Contrary to what the CDC says, Morgellons is not a delusion. I have personally felt and seen my hair move by itself, I’ve had strange fibres come out of my skin, I constantly feel like there are bugs crawling over my body. I have witnessed many of my fresh organic vegetables, fruits and meat moving by itself, causing me to have to throw out the majority of the food I’ve bought. I have had to stop wearing a lot of my clothes because even those seem to be comprised of moving fibres. Some might say the fibres in the video below are moving because of static electricity, however I find that very hard to believe.

Last year in three high schools in Florida, several undercover police officers posed as students. The undercover cops went to classes, became Facebook friends and flirted with the other students. One 18-year-old honor student named Justin fell in love with an attractive 25-year-old undercover cop after spending weeks sharing stories about their lives, texting and flirting with each other. One day she asked Justin if he smoked pot. Even though he didn’t smoke marijuana, the love-struck teen promised to help find some for her. Every couple of days she would text him asking if he had the marijuana. Finally, Justin was able to get it to her. She tried to give him $25 for the marijuana and he said he didn’t want the money — he got it for her as a present. A short while later, the police did a big sweep and arrest 31 students — including Justin. Almost all were charged with selling a small amount of marijuana to the undercover cops. Now Justin has a felony hanging over his head.

‘During the eight years it took James and Karla Murray to complete this project, one third of the stores they featured have closed’

The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.

A software development student from York who hacked into Facebook has been jailed for eight months. Glenn Mangham, 26, had earlier admitted infiltrating the social networking website between April and May 2011. Mangham, of Cornlands Road, York, had shown search engine Yahoo how it could improve security and said he wanted to do the same for Facebook. Sentencing Mangham, Judge Alistair McCreath said his actions could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook. Alison Saunders, from the Crown Prosecution Service, described the case as “the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts”. Prosecutor Sandip Patel rejected Mangham’s claims, saying: “He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.” Facebook spent $200,000 (£126,400) dealing with Mangham’s crime, which triggered a “concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation” by the FBI and British law enforcement, Mr Patel said.

We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies. The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away. The Haitian explanation for how zombies are created involves the distinction between different elements of the human being – including the body, the gwobon anj (the animating principle) and the ti-bon anj, which represents something akin to agency, awareness, and memory.

After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound. The evil face of that campaign was the dastardly, maniacal robot. The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine.

Swiss authorities have confiscated $6 trillion in counterfeit U.S. bonds at the request of Italian prosecutors, authorities in Italy said Friday. Eight people were arrested in Italy and placed under investigation for fraud and other crimes. The bonds, carrying the false date of issue of 1934, had been transported in 2007 from Hong Kong to Zurich, where they were transferred to a Swiss trust, according to prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Potenza. Authorities said that U.S. officials had confirmed the bonds were counterfeit. Prosecutors said the fraud had not been completed, but it appeared that the suspects intended to try to sell the fake bonds to a developing nation, directly or through an intermediary bank.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has once again proven that the only thing Americans need fear, is their own government, with the latest “terror attack” foiled being one entirely of their own design. USA Today reports that a suspect had been arrested by the FBI who was “en route to the U.S. Capitol allegedly to detonate a suicide bomb.” While initial reports portrayed the incident as a narrowly averted terrorist attack, CBS would report that a “high ranking source told CBS News the man was “never a real threat.”” The explosives the would-be bomber carried were provided to him by the FBI during what they described as a “lengthy and extensive operation.” The only contact the suspect had with “Al Qaeda” was with FBI officials posing as associates of the elusive, omnipresent, bearded terror conglomerate. The FBI, much like their MI5 counterparts in England, have a propensity for recruiting likely candidates from mosques they covertly run.

Three U.S. lawmakers urged the Federal Trade Commission to grill Google after it admitted secretly tracking millions of people’s iPhone and Mac Web browsing. Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said they want to know whether Google’s behavior “constitutes a violation” of a privacy settlement Google Inc. and the commission worked out last year. Google pledged at the time not to “misrepresent” its privacy practices to consumers. The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 for every violation each day. Google and three other advertising companies used special computer code that tricks Apple Inc.’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor users’ Internet habits — even though Safari, the most-widely used smartphone Web browser, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Simply put, it is difficult to distinguish a law requiring women to be vaginally penetrated by a long metal object from state-sponsored rape. Worse, discussions among lawmakers leave little doubt that its supporters understood just what they were trying to write into law — they just didn’t care. As an unnamed lawmaker told a fellow Virginia delegate, a woman already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.”

John Muir must be rolling over in his grave. The organization he founded in 1892, the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest environmental group, have been in cahoots with the worst of the worst corporations in recent years. They’ve been paid tens of millions of dollars by the fossil fuel industry, tyrannical billionaire mayors and Wall Street in exchange for cleaning (and greening) up their public images. Not only have they acted as a green public relations firm for the bastions of wealth and power, but have also sold out frontline communities most impacted by extractive industry.

Marketing professors Anastasiya Pocheptsova and Rosellina Ferraro, with graduate student, Ajay T. Abraham, conducted a series of experiments on test groups of cellphone users. The findings appear in their working paper, “The Effect of Mobile Phone Use on Prosocial Behavior.” Prosocial behavior, as defined in the study, is action intended to benefit another person or society as a whole. The researchers found that after a short period of cellphone use the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community service activity when asked, compared to the control-group counterparts. The cell phone users were also less persistent in solving word problems — even though they knew their answers would translate to a monetary donation to charity. The decreased focus on others held true even when participants were merely asked to draw a picture of their cellphones and think about how they used them.

Poachers have slaughtered at least 200 elephants in the past five weeks in a patch of Africa where they are more dangerously endangered than anywhere else on Earth, wildlife activists said. The money made from selling elephant tusks is fueling misery throughout the continent, the International Fund for Animal Welfare warned. Many elephant calves orphaned by the recent killings have been spotted in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park, and activists fear the animals may soon die of hunger and thirst. “Their deaths will only compound the impact of the poaching spree on the Cameroon’s threatened elephant populations,” the organization said Thursday in a statement. It is not known how many elephants remain in the West African nation. The latest figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated there were only 1,000 to 5,000 left in 2007.

The internet is broken – we need to start over … Last year, the level and ferocity of cyber-attacks on the internet reached such a horrendous level that some are now thinking the unthinkable: to let the internet wither on the vine and start up a new more robust one instead. On being asked if we should start again, many – maybe most – immediately argue that the internet is such an integral part of our social and economic fabric that even considering a change in its fundamental structure is inconceivable and rather frivolous. I was one of those. However, recently the evidence suggests that our efforts to secure the internet are becoming less and less effective, and so the idea of a radical alternative suddenly starts to look less laughable.

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don’t realize when they’re nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade’s, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals. It’s an experiential trap street—an infinite loop—a deliberate cartographic error introduced into the mapping of the world so as to sow detour and digression. A kind of digital baffling, or recursive geography as state defensive tactic. I’m also curious when we might see this privatized and domesticated—gated communities, for instance, blocking the GPS navigation of their streets in the misguided belief that this will help protect them from future burglary, effectively delisting themselves from public cartographic records. Perhaps the future of neighborhood security lies in the privatized repurposing of advanced signal-jamming technology

✰ Pa. man’s Facebook ‘surfer’ page lured teens

A married father used phony Facebook profiles to pose as two different Florida surfers to solicit sexually graphic messages and photos from seven teenage girls in western Pennsylvania, and two of the girls eventually agreed to meet for sex with the surfers’ middle-aged “friend” — yet another fake persona he used, the state attorney general said Friday. William R. Ainsworth, 53, of Mars, was charged Thursday with 68 counts, including involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and multiple counts of charges that include attempted unlawful contact with a minor, possession of child pornography and criminal use of a computer.

The address book in smartphones — where some of the user’s most personal data is carried — is free for app developers to take at will, often without the phone owner’s knowledge. Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them — routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers. The practice came under scrutiny Wednesday by members of Congress who saw news reports that taking such data was an “industry best practice.” Apple, which approves all apps that appear in its iTunes store, addressed the controversy on Wednesday after lawmakers sent the company a letter asking how approved apps were allowed to take address book data without users’ permission. Apple’s published rules on apps expressly prohibit that practice.

The stocky man showed up in a basketball uniform for a game at Century High School in North Dakota. Players and coaches assumed he was a fan who had come with another team, so nobody objected when he began to pitch in around the bench. “He helped lay out uniforms, got water. He even gave a couple of kids shoulder massages. Creepy stuff like that,” said Jim Haussler, activities director for the Bismarck Public School District. After the game was over, the man joined the winning team on the court and asked if he could get a piggyback ride. One bemused player gave it to him. “He makes himself appear as if he’s limited or handicapped. I think he plays an empathy card, so to speak,” Haussler said. “We didn’t realize what we were dealing with until several days later.”

Sir Paul has a self-confessed passion for marijuana. He has also been in trouble for drugs more times than bandmate John Lennon ever was, despite Lennon’s reputation as a heavy user. Sir Paul, 69, was introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan, who was stunned to learn he was a ‘pot virgin’ – in the mid-Sixties. After that came heroin, cocaine, LSD and a range of other psychedelics which inspired some of the Beatles’ best known songs. Sir Paul’s rap sheet for drugs is almost as long as his list of hits. He was arrested for cannabis possession in Sweden and at his Scottish farm in 1972.

It says that “a Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner has awarded Heather Peters $9,867.” As was discussed last month on All Things Considered, “Peters decided to opt out of a class-action settlement that would have given her as little as $100 and awarded the attorneys $8.5 million. The 46-year-old Los Angeles resident, who is also a lawyer, decided to even the playing field by filing her suit in a small claims court, which doesn’t allow the parties to retain lawyers.” Her case: Peters showed that ads had claimed her Honda Civic hybrid would get 50 miles per gallon. In court, as Eyder previously wrote, “she came armed with hundreds of pictures of her dashboard showing that she got at best 42 miles per gallon and after a software update that number dropped to fewer than 30 miles per gallon.”

A neighborly dispute over dog poop turned deadly in the Tacony section of Philadelphia. It happened just after 4 p.m. Tuesday on the 6500 block of Torresdale Avenue. Tyrirk Harris, 27, is accused of killing his 47-year-old neighbor Franklin Manuel Santana, according to Philadelphia Police. Cops say Santana walked a couple doors down Torresdale to confront Harris over his dogs. “A German Shepherd and a Chihuahua — these dogs were running free,” said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small. “There were dog feces on several of the neighbor’s yards. That’s what led to this particular confrontation.” Police say Harris then pulled out a 9-mm handgun and shot his neighbor several times, striking Santana in his face and chest.

Computer hackers known as Anonymous leaked information obtained by hacking into private intelligence firm Stratfor’s computer network. The documents – what Anonymous is calling a teaser – suggest that from at least October to November 2011 Stratfor worked with Texas law enforcement to infiltrate the Occupy movement and spy on the Deep Green Resistance movement. The document contains emails in which Stratfor employees discuss Occupy Austin and Deep Green Resistance. Stratfor “Watch Officer” Marc Lanthemann writes about receiving information on Occupy Austin and DGR from a “Texas DPS agent.” The Texas Department of Public Safety is a statewide law enforcement agency that includes an Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.” – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 19th century French philosopher

David Choe has received a world wind of media attention after the story broke that he is holding $200 million worth of Facebook stock after painting their offices in 2005. Barbara Walters recently met up with Choe for an interview, and to hit the streets. Check out the hilarious video.

Not only were the smaller farms concerned over how the manufactured seeds had been carried by wind and creature alike onto their own plantations, but the biggest problem perhaps was that Monsanto was filing lawsuits themselves against farmers. Monsanto went after hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patented seed after audits revealed that their farms had contained their product — as a result of routine pollination by animals and acts of nature. Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few years as a result. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually during that span with a so-called “seed police.”

The average American uses enough water each year to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and global agriculture consumes a whopping 92% of all fresh water used annually. Those are the conclusions of the most comprehensive analysis to date of global water use, which also finds that one-fifth of humankind’s water consumption flows across international borders as “virtual water”—the water needed to produce a commodity, such as meat or electronics, if the ultimate consumers were to make it themselves rather than outsource its growth or manufacture.

When Ellen Terrell and her husband, Charlie, flew out of DFW Airport several months ago, Terrell says she was surprised by a question a female TSA agent asked her. “She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘You just have such a cute figure.’” Terrell says she walked into the body scanner which creates an image that a TSA agent in another room reviews. Terrell says she tried to leave, but the female agent stopped her. “She says, ‘Wait, we didn’t get it,’” recalls Terrell, who claims the TSA agent sent her back a second time and even a third. But that wasn’t good enough. After the third time, Terrell says even the agent seemed frustrated with her co-workers in the other room. “She’s talking into her microphone and she says, ‘Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go. Come on out.’” When TSA agents do a pat down on a traveler, only female agents are allowed to touch female passengers. But the TSA allows male agents to view the images of female passengers.

Gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, is increasingly showing resistance to one of the last known effective antibiotic treatments, leading researchers from the Centers for Disease Control to “sound the alarm” about potentially untreatable forms of the disease. “During the past three years, the wily gonococcus has become less susceptible to our last line of antimicrobial defense, threatening our ability to cure gonorrhea,” Gail Bolan, director of the CDC’s sexually transmitted disease prevention program, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine last week.

Arthur C. Clarke once famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So perhaps it was inevitable that the Pentagon’s extreme technology arm would eventually start acting like magicians — and try to create illusions on the front lines. In its new budget, unveiled on Monday, Darpa introduced a new $4 million investigation into technologies that will “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions.” Darpa calls the project “Battlefield Illusion.” Of course. “The current operational art of human-sensory battlefield deception is largely an ad-hoc practice,” the agency sighs as it lays out the project’s goals. But if researchers can better understand “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,” the military should be able to develop “auditory and visual” hallucinations that will “provide tactical advantage for our forces.”

Do devastating hurricanes need help from affirmative action? A member of Congress apparently thinks so, and is demanding the storms be given names that sound “black.” The congressional newspaper the Hill reported this week that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, feels that the current names are too “lily white,” and is seeking to have better representation for names reflecting African-Americans and other ethnic groups. “All racial groups should be represented,” Lee said, according to the Hill. She hoped federal weather officials “would try to be inclusive of African-American names.” A sampling of popular names that could be used include Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn, according to the paper.